author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Why not. It looks nice, after all. I think we'll say that Uncle Matt bought it here.

Chapter outline is mostly done. Between that and my markups on the previous draft, I'm really ready for a type-in. I spent part of tonight dashing back into the three and a half rewritten chapters and seeding them with foreshadowy things and subplot arc beginnings. Hopefully things will sew up as nicely as I go.

Tomorrow morning John and I leave for Bloomington, Indiana, to see Cate. Yay, Cate! I am going to spend much of the plane ride darning socks. To that end, I am testing the waters of airport security by bringing my little wooden container of darning needles and my Christmas present from Sarah, a yarn-cutting pendant. It's awesome. It's not only a useful craft implement; it's totally goth. Well, aside from the cute little Clover logo.

The blade is totally protected so that this thing is dangerous only to yarn, but maybe the good folks at the metal detector arches will mistake it for a ninja throwing star and freak out. We'll have to see. Hopefully, by the time we land in Indianapolis, I'll have put three more of my handknit wool socks back into service. And that'll be a good thing, because it's freakin' cold in that part of the country. Even more so than here.

Yeehah! About a thousand words yesterday, almost three thousand today; I might actually finish this thing on time!

So Gwen and her husband Tim are babysitting the wayward fictional Brooke at the bookstore knows as The Bookwyrm's Horde (which, by the way, will be the title of the novel that precedes this one in the series). Tim runs the store in the mornings and Gwen in the afternoons. Meanwhile Brooke is just hanging out. We have discovered some things about interfictional cosmology (and when I say "we" I am not being coy and meaning "the reader"; I mean "I just discovered this stuff today, isn't it cool?"), such as...

• Brooke can't read any "sibling" fictions--books written by people who call the same place Gwen does "the real world." The words become intelligible to her.
• This is not a contradiction with Brooke having read the manuscript of the novel Gwen wrote. Brooke is in that novel. She can read it just fine.
• Fictional characters who have travelled to their author's "real world" are going to want to steer very clear of the Bookwyrm's Horde, or at least the actual shelves. They do not want to meet the Bookwyrm.
• The Bookwyrm's lair looks very different to an author than it does to a talemouse. For one thing, it's not nearly as scary.
• The Bookwyrm cannot tell stories. It can only collect them.

This to be said about IHOP's pumpkin pancakes: They go best with butter pecan syrup.

John and I pooped out of the IHOP All-Nighter at around midnight-thirty. I was tired, and he was getting bored. We're both hitting Week 2 with a vengence. Week 2 is when the novel stops being fun, see. I think I'm digging a few holes through that wall, though. Slowly but surely. Taking a spoon to the mortar and sccrrraaaaaaping awayyyyyyy.

The thing about all that scraping is, odd fragments of things show up amid the mortar crumbs. Paradoxically, I have to make up fresh details in order to give my talemouse an ambiguity to chew through. How does he get Brooke out of her own timeline and into Gwen's? He gnaws a hole where a little yellow flower grows in the park, just something that Gwen put there for color but didn't bother to identify or describe or even think about. And Brooke fell into the hole. How does he keep tabs on Brooke once Gwen finds her in Central Park? He rides in the skin of a bit-part character, a jogger I threw into the scene to keep Brooke and Gwen from turning into talking heads. Just something to distract Brooke for a moment, a jogger running by. Unnamed, unimagined, it gives Rakash Sketterkin a way in.

So there's a jogger that wasn't there before, and a yellow flower that I had to go back and add, just so I could say that the story was vague about the jogger or the flower.

I keep referring to the failure of "Gwen's author"--me--to imagine things properly, or to the fact that "Gwen's author" has never seen New York. Which sort of makes me a character in this book. If it's a Mary Sue thing, it's the oddest Mary Sue I ever did see.

Today's leap in word count is partially due to Greywolf--that's the New Orleans Municipal Liaison--inviting me into her daily NaNoChat, where participants participated in 15-minute word sprints. I got something like 228 and 336 words in those two races, words I think I can be proud of. Then another 800 or so at the IHOP later in the evening, followed by 300ish in bed just now. Today was a good day.

Tomorrow, well, who knows. Tomorrow will be full of laundry, house-cleaning, cat food making, and car repair. The car died on us today. I think its alternator went wherever it is that the dogs go at the end of a convention. You know. During the dead dog party.

With any luck I might still be able to, on top of everything, attend another write-in. Wish me luck!

Playing catch up! OK. Where did we leave off?

Ah yes. Partying until the last dog done died. Dude, I went up to the Consuite at about 6:00 PM and didn't leave until 2:00 AM. I think it's safe to say that of the World Fantasy and Horror Conventions I've attended (WHC '02 and '04; WFC '04 and '05), WFC '05 had the best attended, most hospitable, and most fully stocked Consuite of 'em all. Fred, we love ya. Additional shout-outs to Alma and Deck, Lucien Soulban, my fellow sock-knitter John (Hay?), Darcy (recipient of a brand new misshapen doily) and her fellow gatecrashers, and Kevin Przybylowski. And of course Jen Tishrean, fellow NaNo'er and fellow traveller whose train has probably reached its home station by now.

I slept through much of the return journey. Due to the aforementioned late night, I didn't get much sleep before it was time for Jen and I to pack up and run like the wind down eight blocks of State Street to the bus stop whence we'd be whisked away from Madison and down to Chicago. Then, due to much sight-seeing in Chicago, I slept through most of the afternoon on the train. Stayed up writing and reading and playing computer games in the lounge car, then slept the rest of the night away. And then I did the biking/bussing thing to get home from Union Station in Denver, and I slept through much of that afternoon.

I was awake enough to notice the neat stuff about catching a west-bound California Zephyr in Chicago, though. Since Chicago is the very beginning of the route, we got all the route-beginning announcements, like descriptions of the route, the cars, the services, and so forth. I made a reservation to eat in the dining car this time, which was neat. Got sat with two other party-of-ones, with whom I exchanged the sort of small-talk that substitutes for getting to know one another. I had the cod. The cod was quite good. The veggies, however, were limp and tasteless, and the rice pilaf was even more bland than that served at the WFC Awards Banquet. One of my dining companions found the chicken pretty dry, too. Butter and ranch dressing seemed to solve both problems.

When I finally woke up Tuesday afternoon, I headed down to Caffe Sole for a NaNoWriMo write-in. I used the Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 so that Willow could borrow my Averetec, and it's amazing how many distractions you can find on a DOS-bound non-networked computer. Just for instance, when I got to wondering about daily averages, I wrote myself a NaNoWriMo Progress Evaluator script in QBasic, which you can download if you so desire. (Its PHP incarnation is available here.)

Distractions aside, you can see that I made progress. More tonight, hopefully, at the IHOP All-Night Write-In. Stay tuned.

I am now a virgin in one less way than before. I have been on a train.

The California Zephyr, in fact, on the Denver-Chicago leg. It was cool. I was worried, but eighteen hours in coach wasn't all that bad. See, they assign you to a car, and then you just pick a seat on that car (shoving your boarding pass into the shelf above your seat to mark your territory and incidentally prove that you belong on board). And in my car, the ratio of people to seats was greater than 2, so everyone got to stretch out across a pair. Seats come with plenty of leg room, the usual foot rest and seat-back tray table, and a cushioned leg rest that took me until this morning to discover and figure out.

Then there's the sightseer lounge car. Its top side has windows that curve right up to the roof, and side-viewing chairs with elbow tables and cupholders in the wall. Its bottom level is a diner with booth tables and a snack counter. Both levels have TVs at both ends of the car; I understand they showed Mr. & Mrs. Smith Tuesday evening, but I ended up not watching it. I stayed up journalling, and then I went right to sleep. It's amazing how comfy you can get on those chairs. I didn't wake up until 6:30 AM when we stopped in Omaha, Nebraska.

That's right. I've been to Omaha, whither lead all roads.

(Sorry. That might be an inside joke. Or, at the very least, a location joke: "You had to be there." Whatever.)

I never did make it to the actual diner car, but I gather that's where actual meals were served at actual tables, as opposed to microwaved eggy bagels and bagged sandwiches in the sightseer lounge car. I'll have to try that on the ride home. And I never took a look at the sleeper car, figuring I wouldn't be allowed. I hear it's made up of very narrow rooms that consist pretty much of a bed and nothing else. If I ever take the train all the way from Denver to New Orleans, I'll have to spring for one of them. It more than doubles the price of the ticket, though, and coach is relatively comfy. But I guess it's the lack of privacy that gets to a person after awhile. Three nights on the train is too long for many to go without a room of their own.

I wrote more than 2,000 NaNo-countable words on that train and, later, on the bus from Chicago to Madison. I know things about this novel now that, several years of chewing on the plot notwithstanding, I didn't know before. That Gwen's agent is Chinese and learned English as a second language, for instance. Or that her novel's main character, Brooke, dances at a strip club managed by a nutbar name of Mickey, and the bouncer there is named Ronnie. Or that the talemouse shows up in Gwen's book as Brooke's kindhearted landlord. Talemice get in via the more vaguely imagined parts of books; an exclusively off-stage character mentioned only by function, not name, might well be or become a talemouse. I've also learned that I've forgotten the original name I gave him, and the notebook where I wrote down and played Tarot with that name is not in Madison with me; it's at home. Bugger. For now he's "Mr. Rakash." And Gwen is "Gwen Halpurn-Smith".

We write to find things out. We don't always find out interesting things, but if we don't write we don't find out anything.

The Hospitality Suite was already open tonight, even though registration for the con hasn't yet begun. I saw Alma and Deck there, learned a lot about the relationship of Utah to the Church of Latter Day Saints, and drank a tiny amount of some very nice scotch. All in all, I consider that a successful night.

Tomorrow: Another 2000+ words! Con registration! Breakfast in downtown Madison, Wisconsin! Check back for all the excitement!

No dust bunnes for Niki. *Sigh.* My husband informs me that there will be dust bunnies next week, however, so I should not lose hope.

Why are dust bunnies a good thing? Well, that's for me to vaguely know and you to find out. Mwahahaha. More later.

So the boys' dialogue bit is moving along at a sloggity pace. Another 800 or so words last night, mostly involved with Brian snapping to the revelation that much of what he remembers as dreams weren't dreams after all. There's a lot of dramatic stuff in italics which, were it represented cinematically, would be in sudden, two-second long flashbacks distracting Brian from the current conversation. Sort of cliche, that. Sorry. Maybe today I can clean up the melodrama and get to the end of the chapter.

Last night also involved Writing In Strange Places. Sometimes I just want to get out of the house, away from the familiar, and put myself somewhere else specifically to write. It's an elaborate sort of ritual, a means by which the everyday mind gets jump-started into writer mind, and it really helps when my usual writing places--the kitchen table, the bed, the IHOP, the Tea Spot--get mentally fouled up, associated with web surfing and game playing instead of writing.

I thought maybe I'd go sit among the pumpkins at the grocery store, because sometimes you just have to sit in a pumpkin patch and that's as close as I'm going to get. But the store hadn't quite closed yet, and the fluorescents under the grocery store awning looked uninspiring, and I ended up in the North Boulder Memorial Gardens instead.

I'm not sure what it's really called. It's a long stretch of land in the crook of Diagonal Highway where it turns left from used-to-be-Iris onto also-known-as-Foothills. John and I came to walk here the night before he left town for his Las Vegas start-up software company adventure, back in, oh, 2001-ish. The place isn't lit at night, and I came in from the treeline to the west rather than the walkway from the south, so I had to keep an eye out for the flat depressions where memorial stones lay, thus avoiding a sprained ankle. I headed up to sit on the steps by the central tower.

There's an ornate door in that tower, making it look like some special memorial monument or maybe a mausoleum. In fact, the tower is nothing but a storage shed. I know this for a fact because, as you can see in the picture, the door was actually open. It was cracked just wide enough to admit my hand with a camera in it. Taking pictures with the flash on, I could see there wasn't much more in there than a styrofoam box full of decorative trinkets of a plasticky dulce et decorum est nature.

Which is sad, because when a door you're accustomed to being locked suddenly stands open before you, what you really want to find on the other side is, like, Narnia.

So I sat there on the steps and slogged away at Chapter 10 until I got too cold, at which point I packed it up, headed in, and put myself to bed, where I continued the Chapter 10 slog. Bed is a cool place to continue writing; I woke up with vague dreams about what Mike was saying to Brian. They weren't comfortable dreams, and I can't remember exact words, but the feeling was right, so that's all good.

This is just to report that the short story manuscript whose title features prominently in this blog entry is in the slush again. Wish it luck and prepare it a comforting homecoming should it come back on its shield rather than with it.

Also, today has been another freelance-happy day. Produced about 400 words of sample article for one prospective client, about 615 words of possibly saleable nonsense for Constant-Content.com, and about 350 words of writing excercise for happy forum fun. So that's, like, almost 1500 words. That's almost a full NaNoWriMo day, or something.

(Speaking of NaNoWriMo, if you're in the Boulder area, maybe you should come by The Tea Spot on October 8.)

I will also apparently start blogging about Boulder and thereabouts in the newly opened Denver chapter of CitySceneBlog.com. If they like my posts, they might actually start paying me. Not, I should stress, a possibility I'm banking on here. Why am I taking on such a gig for only a very slim chance of payment some unknown time in the future? Because it looks like fun. Because I think I'd like a blogging outlet where non-writing-relevant posts aren't verboten, are in fact encouraged. And that ain't happening here in my Actually Writing Blog, not if I'm behaving myself like I should.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have a couple boys out in the Puget Sound to eavesdrop on.

Hey, check this out. The Sheraton Mountain Vista has wi-fi in the lobby. Why the hell'd it take me so long to figure that out? Not that I minded going to Loaded Joe's for my internet fix, but when all I want to do is check email, Google a bit of info, or upload a blog entry, it's nice to have that two minutes from my door rather than ten.

Of course, internet in our room would be even better, but Starwood has not sprung for wireless repeaters. If I go out on the balcony I can sometimes get onto some unsecured private network in the area--its SSID is neither an out-of-the-box default, nor is it obviously related to a neighboring resort--but the flies out there are something awful. And computer monitors? Are ten-star fly attractors.

We'll be driving back to Boulder in a few hours. John wants to be at work for 8:00 AM, and he wants to stop at home and shave first. It's going to be a night of very little sleep and a morning of much earliness.

Chapter 10 is almost done. Brian has been reunited with Mike for the second time, and this time he knows he's not dreaming. I left off with them coming up to the surface to babble happy greetings to each other. No real information has yet been exchanged. The continuation of this conversation will need some careful engineering: Mike will tell Brian how he came to be where he is, a tale that will include admission of unsavory deeds which the elder brother utterly fails to regret; Brian will be shocked, horrified, and as disbelieving as I can paint him without making him look like I rolled him a 5 in Intelligence. That's because his ability to continue relating to his brother after this conversation will depend on how much he can convince himself that he had misheard, or misinterpreted, Mike's tale, and his journey from "he didn't really kill anyone, did he?" to "that bastard has to die" is supposed to take most of the first three quarters of the book. Once again, I've got a lot of delicate psychological tweaking to do here. It's a problem I'd like to sleep on, so I'm stopping here for the night.

And you know what? It's September. You know how far away October 1 is? Not very. You know what that means? Time to haul out Sara Peltier and get that manuscript ready for Delacorte. When we last left off, Sasha was walking into town to return Anubia's video rental and, unbeknownst to her, to run into her crush and find out whether he notices her magical self-image makeover. At this moment, I forget exactly what I'd intended to do with that. I expect tomorrow will involve a lot of rereading.

See you in Boulder.

One of the side benefits of fictioneering is the Fiction Bubble. The author immerses herself in her fictional world, seeing her characters' surroundings out of their eyes, building a wall of narrative around herself word by word. It can be a disadvantage, sure, if the Fiction Bubble makes it hard for the author to focus on Responsible Stuff, sure, but when the real world is full of Seriously Tragic Stuff Against Which One Feels Helpless, a good cushion of fiction between oneself and reality also serves as a cushion between oneself and the onset of clinical depression.

Addendum: This. And on that note, this too.

Cultivate dailiness, ye writers and storytellers, for the Truth may set ye free, but a good Lie can keep ye sane.

Nevertheless. I've begun a short story about rebuilding New Orleans. It's a ghost story, of course. The first few sentences go something like this:

They rebuilt New Orleans on top of its own bones in the year 2006. They caught the floating caskets and anchored them once more to their mausoleums. They planted a new Mardi Gras tree on Bonnabel Boulevard. They dried out Mandina's and put on a fresh pot of red beans and rice. And we all came home.

Meanwhile, Drowning Boy is swimming along. I wish I were going faster with it, but at least Chapter 10 isn't slogging at the sloggy non-speed of Chapter 7. More action and discovery of new worlds; less maudlin wallowing. Because the rewrite has Brian changing land for sea at Lake Union instead of Alki Beach, I had to get him through the Ballard Locks. Research can be fun! Another side benefit of fictioneering: the author never lacks for excuses to learn a little bit about everything.

Not that I don't have a good excuse already, what with being a human being in an interesting--sometimes too-interesting--world. But it's amazing how far down a tangent "I can use this in a story" will go.

The 17th Street Canal levee is gone. Lake Pontchartrain is swallowing the city.

Residents are warned not to return until at least Monday, and that just to retrieve possessions. New Orleans is uninhabitable, will be for at least six weeks. Or months. I forget which Mom said.

Goddess, haven't we all suffered enough? Haven't they?

Dad's still stranded at Touro Hospital, able to do nothing but watch the water rise. I can only pray he'll be all right. Him and all the many other New Orleanians still in the city for whatever reason.

(Writing-blogging will resume this evening, if I can get my mind off the impending apocalypse long enough to return to plot my main characters' personal armageddon.)